Best of April Fools

It’s that one day when you can’t trust anything you see or hear. Wait a minute, in the case of the music and instrument industries, that’s pretty much just like any other day. Even so, we’ve rounded up the best of the day’s news we’ve found so far.

It’s that one day when you can’t trust anything you see or hear. Wait a minute, in the case of the music and instrument industries, that’s pretty much just like any other day. Even so, we’ve rounded up the best of the day’s news we’ve found so far.

Nord has introduced this lovely fruit basket, designed to hang from your keyboard in case you require sustenance in the middle of the gig. We have no idea what happens if you use it with a non-Nord instrument, other than perhaps having more money left over to buy fruit.

You thought traditional 5U down to Eurorack was a good size transition for modular synths? Via Synthtopia, a Russian Eurorack case manufacturer MDR has done that one better. You may need tweezers (zircon-encrusted or otherwise) to manipulate the patch cables, but no matter how many modules you accumulate, you won’t need a divorce attorney.

The prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston has finally recognized a long-misunderstood but incredibly versatile musical instrument as worthy of its own major in performance. Click the picture above to find out what it is.

Are you getting one of those new MacBooks that only has a USB-C port? Accessory manufacturer PowerMax has the solution for keeping all your legacy storage devices in play, and it’s simply ... Awesome.

Why on earth would you trade your keyboard workstation, clonewheel, and cover band gig for making electronic music using Ableton and a laptop? Because you’ve finally realized that those guys are getting all the dates. Like, even more than your drummer. Maybe that has something to do with this new Max For Live plug-in that brings hookup app Tinder right into the music production environment. With Abletinder, you can say yea or nay to future ex-wives (or ex-husbands) without even a small interruption in your live set or music production workflow. And isn’t that what all keyboard players want?

Last but not least, recent events have proven that the distinction between musical homage and musical plagiarism is, shall we say, a blurred line. The controversy has now spread to the jam band scene, where Kyle Hollingsworth of String Cheese Incident is suing Joel Cummins of Umphrey’s McGee for “riff infringement.” Get the full story here:

Fathers’ Day is always a challenge, trying to find something other than the usual cliché “manly” gifts. Fortunately, we’ve picked a few of our favorite things that should put a smile on your dad’s face and a song in his heart (perhaps even captured on his recording platform of choice) this coming Sunday, June 21.

The editors' picks for standout instruments and gear at NAMM 2012. On the first day we encountered the game-changing Line 6 StageScape system, Ivory 2's new American Steinway virtual piano, a Nord organ with real drawbars, and tiny but mighty anolog synths from Moog and Arturia.

If you've done any amount of traveling in the past few years, you may have come across a piano just sitting in a public place, just begging to be played. Here's how to find out if there's one near you.

FROM HIS COLLEGE DAYS THROWING UNDERGROUND PARTIES THROUGH founding influential label Dim Mak in 1996, Steve Aoki always had one foot in electronica, the other in rock, and a third in hip-hop—producing artists as different from one another as Teddybears, Snoop Dogg, and Bloc Party.